Lexical selection and phonological encoding during language production: Evidence for cascaded processing

The time course of lexicalization during production was explored using a production priming procedure. Participants were presented with pictures to name. Occasionally, a visual target word was presented following a picture, and participants named the word. In Experiments 1A and 1B, phonological priming was found for targets related to the dominant name of a picture, as well as for those related to a near-synonymous name. These results suggest that phonological activation occurs for multiple lexical candidates. In Experiments 2A and 2B, semantic priming was found to arise earlier than phonological priming. In Experiment 3, no priming was found for words phonologically related to category associates, suggesting that the activation of such items is weak. Overall, the results are supportive of a cascaded processing model of lexicalization in which activation spreads continuously from semantic to phonological levels of representation.